A TV documentary producer by the name of Joshua Gates is making an Earhart episode for a show called Expedition Unknown. Tom King and I have corresponded with and helped Josh but there is no contractual relationship.
The back-story is that according to a 1969 Fiji Times article, a kid named Grey in Suva found a skull under a house that had belonged to a medical doctor. Mike Elliot-Jones of TIGHAR tracked this down and we've been looking into it. When Josh Gates contacted us about the bones in Fiji we passed this on to him, and he pursued it with Grey, asking the obvious question whether Grey had looked for more bones. Grey said no, so Gates got permission to do so and did.
A couple days ago I got this email from Josh:
"Josh Gates here. I've been filming in Fiji for the last week as part of our Earhart episode. We've been touching down with some of the leads regarding the lost bones theories. We interviewed John Grey, the man who (when he was 13) found a box containing a skull under his house in Suva. Though he maintains the skull was donated to the Fiji museum, they have no record of it in their archives. Obviously, you know all this. After all, nearly everywhere I've traveled to here, people say, "the TIGHAR group was here and they looked through everything!" So...very thorough work by you and your team.
When I was talking with John about the box and the skull, I asked him if he'd ever been back to his childhood house to search under the house for any additional remains. He confessed that he hadn't and that the police didn't do an overly thorough job in 1968 in looking under the house. So, tonight I went there with him, and with permission from the current owner, investigated in the crawl spaces under the house. About an hour into the search, I uncovered a variety of bones directly adjacent to where John Grey found the box and the skull. The crime scene unit from the Fiji police department is there now, and they'll have a forensics guy examining the bones tomorrow. They may well turn out to be animal bones...dead family dog...who knows. But, I wanted to let you know. At a bare minimum, it was an exciting find, and, while I'm not sure Amelia is under that house, someone else might be.
Hope this finds you well, Ric!
Cheers,
Josh
________________________
JOSH GATES | HOST, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
EXPEDITION UNKNOWN"
Yesterday there was a fairly garbled and wifty article in the Fiji Times about the discovery of bones so now we're getting inquiries about it. It's an interesting development and we're naturally eager to learn whether the bones Josh found are human - but we're still a loooong way from any connection with Earhart.